Art Institute of Chicago

"I hate the mysterious because it's the perfect medium for liars," the novelist Norman Rush once wrote, "the place they go to multiply and preen and lie to each other. Liars are the enemy. They transcend class, sex, and nation. They make everything impossible." The most serious test for any work of narrative art that chooses to trade in the mysterious is set by this observation. If you're going to withhold from your audience — tease them with strangeness, secrecy — you have to play fair or you'll fail. Think of the show "Lost" — years of random mysteries tossed into the air with nobody there to catch them when they finally...

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Amid the excitement over the news Tuesday that the Art Institute of Chicago will receive its largest-ever art gift, $400 million worth of postwar works donated by Chicago philanthropists Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, the art itself may have taken a back...

A major private contemporary art collection with a value estimated at $400 million is being donated to the Art Institute of Chicago by local philanthropists Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, in what the museum is calling the largest gift of art in its history...

1891: Born Archibald John Motley Jr. in New Orleans on Oct. 7 to Mary Huff Motley and Archibald John Motley Sr.
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